Telecommunications based on optical fibers is a rapidly evolving technical field. In addition to long distance transmission fibers replacing more traditional conducting wire cables, a large variety of other types of optical fiber components are also required in order to make up a complete modern optical telecommunication system. Such components include, for example, optical amplifiers based on rare-earth metal doped active fibers and different types of spectral multiplexing and filtering devices. Spectral filtering in various forms is especially important in systems based on wavelength division multiplexing, WDM.
It is known that an optical fiber, more specifically a single mode fiber can be used as a spectral filter device by coiling the fiber around a reel or corresponding circular body in order to subject the fiber lengthwise to a certain continuous curvature. The radius of this curvature determines the cut-off wavelength of such a coiled fiber filter. With smaller radius of the curvature the cut-off wavelength moves towards shorter wavelengths. When the wavelength of the light transmitted through the fiber core exceeds the aforementioned cut-off wavelength, the optical power starts to leak from the fiber core to the cladding layer surrounding the core. In the cladding layer the light experiences significantly higher attenuation than in the fiber core. The overall attenuation characteristics of a the fiber filter can be controlled by the number of fiber turns coiled around the reel.
In practise, the operation of a coiled fiber filter deviates from ideal because above the cut-off wavelength all of the wavelengths do not become attenuated equally and homogeneously. Because only a finite number of guided modes exits in the cladding layer, some wavelengths become coupled to cladding modes more effectively than others. The limited number of cladding modes gives rise to a certain amount of unwanted coupling of the light from the cladding layer back to the fiber core, i.e. reversed coupling effects. As a result of these aforementioned effects, the typical transmission of a prior art coiled fiber filter shown in FIG. 1 as graph P is not a smooth downward curve after the cut-off wavelength λoff, but instead shows significant “interference” peaks at certain wavelengths. For comparison, FIG. 1 also shows a more desirable smooth transmission graph I of a more ideal low-pass filter.
From the prior art certain solutions are known in order to reduce the aforementioned effects. These solutions are primarily based on the idea of increasing the attenuation of the cladding layer and/or by arranging the cladding layer to be surrounded with a specific envelope layer, which allows the light to leak from the cladding layer further to this outside envelope or jacket layer. However, these prior art solutions have certain significant limitations. Because they are basically based on increasing the attenuation of the cladding layer, they are not suitable for those applications where also the cladding layer itself is utilized as an optical waveguide. Such applications include, for example, cladding pumped optical fiber amplifiers, where the pump light propagating in the cladding layer should not become attenuated due to the intrinsic optical properties of the cladding layer.